Two New Hotels Costing $100 Million Planned for Sacramento Airport

Sonnenblick Development LLC, which helped develop Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel, will spend $100 million on two hotels at California’s Sacramento International Airport, the site’s first new lodging properties in 30 years.

The Los Angeles-based company won the contract to build the hotels, to be attached to the airport’s new Terminal B, according to Robert Sonnenblick, the company’s principal. Construction of a 225-room full-service hotel and a 150-room limited-service property will start in mid-2013, with an opening planned for the first quarter of 2015, he said.

Hotel development has been stagnant in California and across the U.S. because construction financing has been difficult to obtain, according to Sonnenblick. The Sacramento airport’s only hotel, a 150-room property from the mid-1970s, was demolished to make room for the new terminal, he said.

“An airport of this size can support several hotels but currently has none,” Sonnenblick said. “We see this as a specific opportunity that provides us with a monopoly in the foreseeable future.”

Sonnenblick’s company will begin interviewing potential hotel operators for the airport properties this month, he said. The contract to build the hotels is with Sacramento County, which is leasing the land to Sonnenblick Development.

The firm has spent $100 million over the past two years to buy seven parcels on the U.S. coasts, in locations it hasn’t disclosed, for luxury resorts.

To contact the reporter on this story: Nadja Brandt in Los Angeles at nbrandt@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Daniel Taub at dtaub@bloomberg.net